23 ms·

College Board Drops Plans for SAT Student Adversity Score

93 points by big_chungus 7y ago

ThrowawayR2 7y ago
Quoting from the article: "Instead, it will try to capture a student’s social and economic background in a broad array of data points. The new tactic is called Landscape and doesn’t combine the metrics into a single score." So they didn't really drop it. They just revised it a bit and gave it a new name.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > They just revised it a bit and gave it a new name I don’t think that’s fair. Saying “this student is from a 6th decile income and 9th decile funding school district” is different from combining those data into a single measure. The former presents information. The latter analyses it.
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    True, but choosing which stats to include in the presentation is also in itself a form of analysis.
    - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
      > choosing which stats to include in the presentation is also in itself a form of analysis Agreed. But it’s less reductive than a private company deciding on its own what does and doesn’t constitute adversity (and to what degree).
- the_jeremy 7y ago
  It's still a huge improvement (not that this is good, just that a single metric for adversity is completely ridiculous).
  - blisterpeanuts 7y ago
    Some would argue that any metric for adversity is inherently unfair. Probably the best example to support this view is that of a student with hidden adversity, e.g. abusive parent or unreported learning disability that had to be overcome, despite being an "advantaged" ethnicity and living in an affluent suburb.
    - Ancalagon 7y ago
      Agreed. I really don't believe the College Board can gain an accurate picture of whatever adversity their test takers have faced based off of the data they collect.
      - dmix 7y ago
        Of course not. It's always going to be shot in the dark, they'll have to put a ton of trust in the information put in front of them. They aren't going out in the field to interview friends and family. A single nice family home in the suburbs could have one kid turn out to be a successful judge and the other a drug addict drop-out (even Trump's older brother died an alcoholic). Good luck measuring that honestly from a college entrance office.
  - sk5t 7y ago
    Do you believe that the consumers of the "landscape" scores won't sum those values up or apply some substantially similar reduction?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - pacala 7y ago
    The goal is to perform action selection. No matter how many metrics you come up with, you have to aggregate them into a single score to rank the set of possible actions. The fact that producing such a score is preposterous is merely an indication the whole idea of adversity metric[s] for deciding the future of our children is morally and functionally bereft. The change moves the onus of metric aggregation from the College Board to individual colleges. We'll institutionalize injustice / poor decision making, but you'll have a choice of which institution will apply the injustice. Blind admissions. We may even incentivize kids to actually study for college, instead of waltzing in with a seventh grade reading level. If we don't like that recent immigrants outperform natives [of all colors!], perhaps we could perform a serious root cause analysis and address it, instead of papering over the metrics. https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6174 https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6174: The average college freshman reads at 7th grade level
- ravenstine 7y ago
  > The new tactic is called Landscape That's some real Newspeak right there.
- morpheuskafka 7y ago
  Part of the concern was that they were claiming, by putting them into a single "adversity score," that they could somehow claim to measure a student's adversity with absolutely zero opportunity for the student to present evidence to challenge the broad social inferences College Board planned to make from low-resolution school and neighborhood level data. I definitely don't like them making these kind of files on students and I think they should be required to get informed consent from the students--the data subjects--to do so, especially since students are the customers and pay for the tests. However, I do think there is some real improvement in acknowledging that this is a limited metric and no longer claiming that it somehow represents a comprehensive score.
  - dmix 7y ago
    I'd bet money those college entrance consultants are happy about another metric they could hack and exploit for personal gain. People are already giving up guardianship of their kids to get into schools: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746687110/some-parents-are-giving-up-guardianship-of-their-kids-to-get-college-financial-a https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746687110/some-parents-are-gi... Since it can't be based on a thorough review of data and people's actual background for scaling reasons, it's all going to be about the initial presentation and gaming the system will continue to increase the more entrance is disconnected from academic ability. Hopefully the end result is less companies blindly hiring people based on their university degree, which is already happening, but there will always be perks from the name recognition alone regardless which is what I guess people are betting on when they are trying to tip the scales.
    - Throw_Away_6232 7y ago
      So they change the person who is their guardian before they reach the age of majority, and this does permanently change the persons who are used to calculate the expected family contribution? The article is a bit unclear.
    - Aperocky 7y ago
      The perfect solution to that is github and fizzbuzz (perhaps something bit harder). Non-programming job are going to shrink soon enough, there won't be anyone hiring 'blindly' in those field, or largely at all.
- _Nat_ 7y ago
  > They just revised it a bit and gave it a new name. Asians are a minority but out-score whites. So, if you were responsible for assigning an adversity score: 1. Would you say that Asians should get a lower score (since they tend to do better) or a higher score (since they're a minority)? 2. How much of an income difference between an Asian student's family and a white student's family to result in the same score? If you choose to penalize Asian individuals for their racial group doing better on average, how could you justify this to Asians who feel discriminated against? What would you say when they point out that you're penalizing them compared to white people despite being historically discriminated against? If you choose to penalize white individuals despite their racial group doing poorer on average, how could you justify this to whites who feel discriminated against? What would you say when they point out that your system increases, rather than decreases, racial gaps in colleges? To be clear, I agree with you -- this revised system has many of the same problems as the original proposal. But, now some of these tough questions aren't on their shoulders.
  - gnopgnip 7y ago
    It is about equal opportunity, not equal outcome
    - scoobyyabbadoo 7y ago
      That's not how diversity success metrics are reported though. It's said to be a travesty if half the number of women as men choose a STEM major
    - fromthestart 7y ago
      Well, no, and here is the Crux of the issue with affirmative action, and possibly one of the strongest base drivers of the cleavage between the American left approach to race and equality, and the American right approach to the same. These policies attempt to achieve equality of outcome based on the implicit presumption that given equality of opportunity outcomes will be equal among various demographics. Thus any systematic inequalities are, without much in the way of hard evidence (a limitation of the related fields of psychology, economics, and the like) immediately explained by uncompetitive social norms of successful groups, i.e. racism/discrimination - unlocking the justification for penalizing those on top to equalize outcomes for those on the bottom. The result of this implicit and fundamentally unproven assumption is the conflation of equality of outcome with equality of opportunity by the modern American left. This is a point of consternation for those near the center and leaning right primarily because it punishes success without allowing for the possibility of personal/internal explanations for discrepancies, i.e. cultural factors independent of poverty which limit economic success, and/or things like proven heritability of intelligence. Further, one could argue that such a conflation optimizes economic equality over merit, which is probably worse for society overall.
- lozenge 7y ago
  Under the old score system, all students in the US could sue College Board for discrimination in a legally unsettled area (as evidenced by the Harvard lawsuit). Under the Landscape system, students will have to sue each college separately.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Causality1 7y ago
>a diverse student body is part of the educational mission of a school. Why? Why should anyone attempt to intentionally manipulate the ethnic backgrounds of college students? If you award admission bonuses for the symptoms of racism like being worse off financially or going to a poorly-rated high school, wouldn't you be adjusting for adversity in exact proportion to actual hardship instead of assigning an arbitrary value to skin color? This entire process can be completely race-agnostic and still compensate for systemic racism at the same time. I'm also curious what stops me from putting whatever I want in the race field on my application. I don't recall my university running a blood test to check if I was fibbing.
- mises 7y ago
  > I'm also curious what stops me from putting whatever i want int he race field on my application. Nothing, as we found out with Elizabeth Warren being "Indian". As you said, no test. Of course, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable handing my DNA over to every school to which I wanted to apply.
  - blisterpeanuts 7y ago
    The notoriety of the Warren experience may cause institutions to require more documentation in the future. Then, of course, some applicants may experience the opposite problem: the admissions people won't believe them without DNA evidence, and then we have a Gattacca scenario. (from the movie about people's genomes being used in the hiring process)
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      The worst part about this is that the information will doubtless go to a testing facility, and from there will probably end up in the hands of some federal three-letter agency. It's already happened: https://www.wsj.com/articles/customers-handed-over-their-dna-the-company-let-the-fbi-take-a-look-11566491162 https://www.wsj.com/articles/customers-handed-over-their-dna... As more things require it, it will become unavoidable. By the way, I hadn't seen that movie. Thanks for mentioning it; looks like it might be good to watch.
Gomer1800 7y ago
"The College Board, the New York-based nonprofit that oversees the SAT, said it has worried about income inequality influencing test results for year" If only these systems in place focused on this rather than race. I know race in the USA correlates strongly with socioeconomic status and outcomes, but its turned out to be such a divisive issue that consistently antagonizes stakeholders and leads to controversial policy decisions. Sure poverty disproportionately affects some ethnic groups more than others, but it nonetheless has pervasive effects on the health and economic outcomes of people of all races. Hopefully the next system to replace the last takes into account the economic handicaps of students and not their race.
- krastanov 7y ago
  I can agree with you that it might be a more productive fast way to fix some of the issues, but the fact is that racism still affects even the well-off people of color. Maternal deaths related to birth are a recently studied example, as is upward/downward social mobility among the well-off.
  - SamReidHughes 7y ago
    Such studies aren't capable of determining that "racism" is the cause.
    - Miner49er 7y ago
      What else could be a cause?
      - krastanov 7y ago
        While I very much disagree with that idea because it has been disproven plenty of times, the usual "not racism" explanation that people suggest is some inherent difference between ethnicities unrelated to historical subjugation or current policies. At this point I take the proponents of such "not racism" explanations as willfully ignorant implicit racists at best.
cwperkins 7y ago
I think I’m well within the minority here, but I am Conservative and support this initiative. I support it mostly because I’d prefer a transparent system used widely to a bunch of different opaque systems at all the various universities. I also ascribe to the belief that someone who is exceptional in an area where the average may be below proficient is truly exceptional. That being said I want to work to the ideal that something like this won’t be necessary in the future of zip code does not determine outcome.
- chrisbro 7y ago
  What are the conservative-friendly mechanisms for ensuring this type of equality across all zip codes?
- sk5t 7y ago
  How transparent is it, when the test-takers can't obtain or review their own information, or opt out of participating in this scheme?
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  It would only be transparent if admissions were decided by an algorithm based on inputs. With these data from College Boards, you get no transparency: the schools are still allowed to do whatever they want, and now they get extra data for a posteriori justification of their decision.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    Why shouldn’t the schools do what they want? Nobody is entitled to go to the school they want to go to.
- rhegart 7y ago
  Everyone would game being disadvantaged and purposely be even more of a victim than they are now. Being depressed (true depression is different), victimhood is as cool as being a great athlete, genius etc. in today’s society. Subconsciously people stay in the victim loop due to implicit benefits from their peers.
Excel_Wizard 7y ago
How is the Harvard Asian discrimination lawsuit going lately? I haven't heard anything in a while.
TCR19 7y ago
I get the idea that with so many admissions we need some way to "standardize" admissions, but the way we do it is pretty archaic, and definitely doesn't work for a host of different students. Has anyone seen any interesting concepts or ideas around dropping standardized testing in general for something else?
- umanwizard 7y ago
  In many countries it goes the other direction: the standardized exams are much harder than the SAT (so you don't have a bunch of people clustering at the top with perfect scores) and are the only metric used for university admissions.
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    That seems pretty bad too, no? Basing everything off just standardized exams? Are these exams usually/mostly multiple choice?
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      Why does it seem bad to you? To me it seems like the fairest possible method, as long as the tests are reasonably accurate measures of competence. The US method on the other hand where colleges try to assess “leadership” and other qualities of that nature makes no sense to me. What in the world do “leadership”, extracurricular activities, sports ability, etc. have to do with academic ability? I guess it’s because in the US, college is seen as a way of sorting people into social classes, just as much as a place to actually learn something (or more). But a sane system shouldn’t care about having “well-rounded” students — it should optimize for having the best 100 students in physics in the country studying together from the best physicists, the best in history from the best historians, etc. > Are these exams usually/mostly multiple choice? No.
- lithos 7y ago
  Except that having a "failure" of an admissions test is desirable. Colleges would be far worse off in their current and next round of admissions scandals/lawsuits if the test were as clear as something like the ASVAB (where you score is literally the % of people you've beaten).
40acres 7y ago
The problem with diversity programs in education is that they are half baked, if you wanted to truly solve the root causes of racial discrepancies in education you'd need reform at the elementary school level. School districts are too tightly coupled with housing for stakeholders to advocate for reform at that level. If you design programs that try to tackle these discrepancies without aiming at the root cause you get mishaps like this.
- mises 7y ago
  How do you propose to decouple elementary schools and houses? Busing? We saw what kind of a disaster that was [0] [1]. Personally, I think on-line schooling is a better option. Internet is becoming broadly available, and it seems that serving every one the same curriculum (albeit with some adaptivity to what a student is doing better or worse on) seems the most viable way to make sure each student gets the same education, I would think. Then maybe provide a smaller staff at local schools with tutoring and counseling. Online education does a good job [2], and has had good results, even in the third world [3] [4]. It of course needs further development, but I see no reason why it couldn't be a strong contender to mitigate this issue. [0]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/02/how-the-lefts-embrace-of-busing-hurt-the-cause-of-integration.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/02/how-the-lefts-embra... [1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/10/06/496411024/why-busing-didnt-end-school-segregation https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/10/06/496411024/why-bus... [2]: http://news.mit.edu/2014/study-shows-online-courses-effective-0924 http://news.mit.edu/2014/study-shows-online-courses-effectiv... [3]: https://borgenproject.org/online-education-in-developing-countries/ https://borgenproject.org/online-education-in-developing-cou... [4]: https://www.onlinecoursereport.com/democratizing-education-online-education-and-the-developing-world/ https://www.onlinecoursereport.com/democratizing-education-o...
  - nradov 7y ago
    Online schooling only works for motivated, disciplined students. Most children need to have a qualified teacher in the same room in order to learn effectively. That especially applies to subjects that students don't enjoy, but which they need to learn in order to function in society.
wufufufu 7y ago
Credit score is a number highly correlated with your social-economic status and race/ethnicity.
uptownfunk 7y ago
I think there are two dimensions (likely correlated) 1. Race. 2. Socioeconomic status. Callibrating a score on race would be a problem, because you are explicitly reinforcing virtues that lead to suboptimal performance. However calibrating a score on (2) makes sense because kids with unequal resources should have access to the same opportunities, and it is reasonable to me that a top performer in a lower socioeconomic neighborhood would do better than someone who performed similarly were they raised in a more affluent neighborhood. Where you run into problems is that lower socioeconomic neighborhoods are associated strongly with black/Latino populations and so it is indirectly biasing for select racial groups. I don’t think there’s a perfect solution, or one that is 100% equitable to all parties but I think we can do better than we are now, in fact I think it is crucial.
fromthestart 7y ago
If we allow entry of students from underperforming schools into colleges with historically high academic requirements, one of two things will happen, neither of which are particularly good: 1. These students will struggle and be much more likely to fail out, depending on how much of a boost they're given by the so called adversity score 2. Standards will be lowered and as a result graduates will be less competent and schools lose prestige and/or society suffers in the long run from workers who previously would not have qualified for their degrees. You cannot undo the damage of 12 years of poor schooling by simply throwing a student into a more rigorous curriculum, no matter how admirable the intent. And arguably point 2 has already been happening for some time anyway given the swelling of college ranks over the last few years and the corresponding devaluation of the college degree. More people may hold degrees, but the normal distribution of intelligence has not changed, which must indicate that the rigor of the average degree has dropped substantially in the last few decades given the proportion of the population that is now educated.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  those aren't the only two possible outcomes. I went to a pretty good state school with pretty generous admissions criteria, but very rigorous coursework. most of the required courses for stem majors started at the 200 level. if you got a "good" highschool education (ie passed calculus) you were expected to start with CS-201. if not, there were lots of gentle 100-level courses to ease you into programming or teach high school math material that you either didn't take or failed. note when I say gentle, I mean the material itself is not difficult. you would be assigned a large quantity of work in every class at every level. plenty of kids failed out along the way, but it was more because they didn't put in enough time than being hopelessly underprepared for the rigor. you do kinda have to give up on the "undergrad takes exactly four years" thing if you want this to work though. some people will need to do more than 120 credits to fulfill the requirements of the degree. not everyone will be able to take a full-time course load every semester or even any semester. that doesn't make the end result worse when they finally graduate (though it may be more expensive).
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  1) Unlikely, because even today the most selective schools that use holistic admission have far higher graduation rates than less selective schools 2) Even if this is true, this is a feature not a bug As it turns out, college really isn’t all that difficult in most cases, and never has been. If anything standards have increased!
RickJWagner 7y ago
I would think that by college age, the raw input to the school had better be pretty well-refined and at roughly the same level. To let people into big-league colleges with any 'fudge factor' isn't doing them any favors. It's just an easy path to failure. (Also: even if the schools provide hand-holding and personal tutoring, the school had better make sure what is provided sticks. Very well. Else they may graduate some 'charity cases', but it won't be doing the graduates any favors when they hit the workforce.)
- ThrustVectoring 7y ago
  A large portion of the value of a degree is simply in signaling - it tells potential employers rough information about candidate IQ, conscientiousness, and social capital. Graduating unqualified students is absolutely a favor, and a huge one to boot. The primary people harmed are the other students, who suffer the ill effects of inflation in the value of their degree.
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akhilcacharya 7y ago
We can’t simultaneously be mad at programs like this and also say school doesn’t matter. Personally I think providing separate scores for adversity is a good thing. Ultimately getting into ones state school isn’t that difficult, and even if it was your SAT is a small part of that.
conscion 7y ago
Where are all the comments about racial diversity coming from? There's a single article mentioning that _using_ race is a contentious issue - not that this score uses race. Further down in the article, it lists what the scores are based on: > Those factors are college attendance, household structure, median family income, housing stability, education levels and crime. Which all sound like tests of the living conditions and environment that the students had to learn within - and if those strongly correlate with race, then maybe there's other issues that need to be addressed

93 points by big_chungus 7y ago

Quoting from the article: "Instead, it will try to capture a student’s social and economic background in a broad array of data points. The new tactic is called Landscape and doesn’t combine the metrics into a single score." So they didn't really drop it. They just revised it a bit and gave it a new name.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> They just revised it a bit and gave it a new name I don’t think that’s fair. Saying “this student is from a 6th decile income and 9th decile funding school district” is different from combining those data into a single measure. The former presents information. The latter analyses it.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  True, but choosing which stats to include in the presentation is also in itself a form of analysis.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > choosing which stats to include in the presentation is also in itself a form of analysis Agreed. But it’s less reductive than a private company deciding on its own what does and doesn’t constitute adversity (and to what degree).
the_jeremy 7y ago
It's still a huge improvement (not that this is good, just that a single metric for adversity is completely ridiculous).
- blisterpeanuts 7y ago
  Some would argue that any metric for adversity is inherently unfair. Probably the best example to support this view is that of a student with hidden adversity, e.g. abusive parent or unreported learning disability that had to be overcome, despite being an "advantaged" ethnicity and living in an affluent suburb.
  - Ancalagon 7y ago
    Agreed. I really don't believe the College Board can gain an accurate picture of whatever adversity their test takers have faced based off of the data they collect.
    - dmix 7y ago
      Of course not. It's always going to be shot in the dark, they'll have to put a ton of trust in the information put in front of them. They aren't going out in the field to interview friends and family. A single nice family home in the suburbs could have one kid turn out to be a successful judge and the other a drug addict drop-out (even Trump's older brother died an alcoholic). Good luck measuring that honestly from a college entrance office.
- sk5t 7y ago
  Do you believe that the consumers of the "landscape" scores won't sum those values up or apply some substantially similar reduction?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- pacala 7y ago
  The goal is to perform action selection. No matter how many metrics you come up with, you have to aggregate them into a single score to rank the set of possible actions. The fact that producing such a score is preposterous is merely an indication the whole idea of adversity metric[s] for deciding the future of our children is morally and functionally bereft. The change moves the onus of metric aggregation from the College Board to individual colleges. We'll institutionalize injustice / poor decision making, but you'll have a choice of which institution will apply the injustice. Blind admissions. We may even incentivize kids to actually study for college, instead of waltzing in with a seventh grade reading level. If we don't like that recent immigrants outperform natives [of all colors!], perhaps we could perform a serious root cause analysis and address it, instead of papering over the metrics. https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6174 https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6174: The average college freshman reads at 7th grade level
ravenstine 7y ago
> The new tactic is called Landscape That's some real Newspeak right there.
morpheuskafka 7y ago
Part of the concern was that they were claiming, by putting them into a single "adversity score," that they could somehow claim to measure a student's adversity with absolutely zero opportunity for the student to present evidence to challenge the broad social inferences College Board planned to make from low-resolution school and neighborhood level data. I definitely don't like them making these kind of files on students and I think they should be required to get informed consent from the students--the data subjects--to do so, especially since students are the customers and pay for the tests. However, I do think there is some real improvement in acknowledging that this is a limited metric and no longer claiming that it somehow represents a comprehensive score.
- dmix 7y ago
  I'd bet money those college entrance consultants are happy about another metric they could hack and exploit for personal gain. People are already giving up guardianship of their kids to get into schools: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746687110/some-parents-are-giving-up-guardianship-of-their-kids-to-get-college-financial-a https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746687110/some-parents-are-gi... Since it can't be based on a thorough review of data and people's actual background for scaling reasons, it's all going to be about the initial presentation and gaming the system will continue to increase the more entrance is disconnected from academic ability. Hopefully the end result is less companies blindly hiring people based on their university degree, which is already happening, but there will always be perks from the name recognition alone regardless which is what I guess people are betting on when they are trying to tip the scales.
  - Throw_Away_6232 7y ago
    So they change the person who is their guardian before they reach the age of majority, and this does permanently change the persons who are used to calculate the expected family contribution? The article is a bit unclear.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    The perfect solution to that is github and fizzbuzz (perhaps something bit harder). Non-programming job are going to shrink soon enough, there won't be anyone hiring 'blindly' in those field, or largely at all.
_Nat_ 7y ago
> They just revised it a bit and gave it a new name. Asians are a minority but out-score whites. So, if you were responsible for assigning an adversity score: 1. Would you say that Asians should get a lower score (since they tend to do better) or a higher score (since they're a minority)? 2. How much of an income difference between an Asian student's family and a white student's family to result in the same score? If you choose to penalize Asian individuals for their racial group doing better on average, how could you justify this to Asians who feel discriminated against? What would you say when they point out that you're penalizing them compared to white people despite being historically discriminated against? If you choose to penalize white individuals despite their racial group doing poorer on average, how could you justify this to whites who feel discriminated against? What would you say when they point out that your system increases, rather than decreases, racial gaps in colleges? To be clear, I agree with you -- this revised system has many of the same problems as the original proposal. But, now some of these tough questions aren't on their shoulders.
- gnopgnip 7y ago
  It is about equal opportunity, not equal outcome
  - scoobyyabbadoo 7y ago
    That's not how diversity success metrics are reported though. It's said to be a travesty if half the number of women as men choose a STEM major
  - fromthestart 7y ago
    Well, no, and here is the Crux of the issue with affirmative action, and possibly one of the strongest base drivers of the cleavage between the American left approach to race and equality, and the American right approach to the same. These policies attempt to achieve equality of outcome based on the implicit presumption that given equality of opportunity outcomes will be equal among various demographics. Thus any systematic inequalities are, without much in the way of hard evidence (a limitation of the related fields of psychology, economics, and the like) immediately explained by uncompetitive social norms of successful groups, i.e. racism/discrimination - unlocking the justification for penalizing those on top to equalize outcomes for those on the bottom. The result of this implicit and fundamentally unproven assumption is the conflation of equality of outcome with equality of opportunity by the modern American left. This is a point of consternation for those near the center and leaning right primarily because it punishes success without allowing for the possibility of personal/internal explanations for discrepancies, i.e. cultural factors independent of poverty which limit economic success, and/or things like proven heritability of intelligence. Further, one could argue that such a conflation optimizes economic equality over merit, which is probably worse for society overall.
lozenge 7y ago
Under the old score system, all students in the US could sue College Board for discrimination in a legally unsettled area (as evidenced by the Harvard lawsuit). Under the Landscape system, students will have to sue each college separately.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Causality1 7y ago

>a diverse student body is part of the educational mission of a school. Why? Why should anyone attempt to intentionally manipulate the ethnic backgrounds of college students? If you award admission bonuses for the symptoms of racism like being worse off financially or going to a poorly-rated high school, wouldn't you be adjusting for adversity in exact proportion to actual hardship instead of assigning an arbitrary value to skin color? This entire process can be completely race-agnostic and still compensate for systemic racism at the same time. I'm also curious what stops me from putting whatever I want in the race field on my application. I don't recall my university running a blood test to check if I was fibbing.

mises 7y ago
> I'm also curious what stops me from putting whatever i want int he race field on my application. Nothing, as we found out with Elizabeth Warren being "Indian". As you said, no test. Of course, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable handing my DNA over to every school to which I wanted to apply.
- blisterpeanuts 7y ago
  The notoriety of the Warren experience may cause institutions to require more documentation in the future. Then, of course, some applicants may experience the opposite problem: the admissions people won't believe them without DNA evidence, and then we have a Gattacca scenario. (from the movie about people's genomes being used in the hiring process)
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    The worst part about this is that the information will doubtless go to a testing facility, and from there will probably end up in the hands of some federal three-letter agency. It's already happened: https://www.wsj.com/articles/customers-handed-over-their-dna-the-company-let-the-fbi-take-a-look-11566491162 https://www.wsj.com/articles/customers-handed-over-their-dna... As more things require it, it will become unavoidable. By the way, I hadn't seen that movie. Thanks for mentioning it; looks like it might be good to watch.

Gomer1800 7y ago

"The College Board, the New York-based nonprofit that oversees the SAT, said it has worried about income inequality influencing test results for year" If only these systems in place focused on this rather than race. I know race in the USA correlates strongly with socioeconomic status and outcomes, but its turned out to be such a divisive issue that consistently antagonizes stakeholders and leads to controversial policy decisions. Sure poverty disproportionately affects some ethnic groups more than others, but it nonetheless has pervasive effects on the health and economic outcomes of people of all races. Hopefully the next system to replace the last takes into account the economic handicaps of students and not their race.

krastanov 7y ago
I can agree with you that it might be a more productive fast way to fix some of the issues, but the fact is that racism still affects even the well-off people of color. Maternal deaths related to birth are a recently studied example, as is upward/downward social mobility among the well-off.
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  Such studies aren't capable of determining that "racism" is the cause.
  - Miner49er 7y ago
    What else could be a cause?
    - krastanov 7y ago
      While I very much disagree with that idea because it has been disproven plenty of times, the usual "not racism" explanation that people suggest is some inherent difference between ethnicities unrelated to historical subjugation or current policies. At this point I take the proponents of such "not racism" explanations as willfully ignorant implicit racists at best.

cwperkins 7y ago

I think I’m well within the minority here, but I am Conservative and support this initiative. I support it mostly because I’d prefer a transparent system used widely to a bunch of different opaque systems at all the various universities. I also ascribe to the belief that someone who is exceptional in an area where the average may be below proficient is truly exceptional. That being said I want to work to the ideal that something like this won’t be necessary in the future of zip code does not determine outcome.

chrisbro 7y ago
What are the conservative-friendly mechanisms for ensuring this type of equality across all zip codes?
sk5t 7y ago
How transparent is it, when the test-takers can't obtain or review their own information, or opt out of participating in this scheme?
xyzzyz 7y ago
It would only be transparent if admissions were decided by an algorithm based on inputs. With these data from College Boards, you get no transparency: the schools are still allowed to do whatever they want, and now they get extra data for a posteriori justification of their decision.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  Why shouldn’t the schools do what they want? Nobody is entitled to go to the school they want to go to.
rhegart 7y ago
Everyone would game being disadvantaged and purposely be even more of a victim than they are now. Being depressed (true depression is different), victimhood is as cool as being a great athlete, genius etc. in today’s society. Subconsciously people stay in the victim loop due to implicit benefits from their peers.

Excel_Wizard 7y ago

How is the Harvard Asian discrimination lawsuit going lately? I haven't heard anything in a while.

TCR19 7y ago

I get the idea that with so many admissions we need some way to "standardize" admissions, but the way we do it is pretty archaic, and definitely doesn't work for a host of different students. Has anyone seen any interesting concepts or ideas around dropping standardized testing in general for something else?

umanwizard 7y ago
In many countries it goes the other direction: the standardized exams are much harder than the SAT (so you don't have a bunch of people clustering at the top with perfect scores) and are the only metric used for university admissions.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  That seems pretty bad too, no? Basing everything off just standardized exams? Are these exams usually/mostly multiple choice?
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    Why does it seem bad to you? To me it seems like the fairest possible method, as long as the tests are reasonably accurate measures of competence. The US method on the other hand where colleges try to assess “leadership” and other qualities of that nature makes no sense to me. What in the world do “leadership”, extracurricular activities, sports ability, etc. have to do with academic ability? I guess it’s because in the US, college is seen as a way of sorting people into social classes, just as much as a place to actually learn something (or more). But a sane system shouldn’t care about having “well-rounded” students — it should optimize for having the best 100 students in physics in the country studying together from the best physicists, the best in history from the best historians, etc. > Are these exams usually/mostly multiple choice? No.
lithos 7y ago
Except that having a "failure" of an admissions test is desirable. Colleges would be far worse off in their current and next round of admissions scandals/lawsuits if the test were as clear as something like the ASVAB (where you score is literally the % of people you've beaten).

40acres 7y ago

The problem with diversity programs in education is that they are half baked, if you wanted to truly solve the root causes of racial discrepancies in education you'd need reform at the elementary school level. School districts are too tightly coupled with housing for stakeholders to advocate for reform at that level. If you design programs that try to tackle these discrepancies without aiming at the root cause you get mishaps like this.

mises 7y ago
How do you propose to decouple elementary schools and houses? Busing? We saw what kind of a disaster that was [0] [1]. Personally, I think on-line schooling is a better option. Internet is becoming broadly available, and it seems that serving every one the same curriculum (albeit with some adaptivity to what a student is doing better or worse on) seems the most viable way to make sure each student gets the same education, I would think. Then maybe provide a smaller staff at local schools with tutoring and counseling. Online education does a good job [2], and has had good results, even in the third world [3] [4]. It of course needs further development, but I see no reason why it couldn't be a strong contender to mitigate this issue. [0]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/02/how-the-lefts-embrace-of-busing-hurt-the-cause-of-integration.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/02/how-the-lefts-embra... [1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/10/06/496411024/why-busing-didnt-end-school-segregation https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/10/06/496411024/why-bus... [2]: http://news.mit.edu/2014/study-shows-online-courses-effective-0924 http://news.mit.edu/2014/study-shows-online-courses-effectiv... [3]: https://borgenproject.org/online-education-in-developing-countries/ https://borgenproject.org/online-education-in-developing-cou... [4]: https://www.onlinecoursereport.com/democratizing-education-online-education-and-the-developing-world/ https://www.onlinecoursereport.com/democratizing-education-o...
- nradov 7y ago
  Online schooling only works for motivated, disciplined students. Most children need to have a qualified teacher in the same room in order to learn effectively. That especially applies to subjects that students don't enjoy, but which they need to learn in order to function in society.

wufufufu 7y ago

Credit score is a number highly correlated with your social-economic status and race/ethnicity.

uptownfunk 7y ago

I think there are two dimensions (likely correlated) 1. Race. 2. Socioeconomic status. Callibrating a score on race would be a problem, because you are explicitly reinforcing virtues that lead to suboptimal performance. However calibrating a score on (2) makes sense because kids with unequal resources should have access to the same opportunities, and it is reasonable to me that a top performer in a lower socioeconomic neighborhood would do better than someone who performed similarly were they raised in a more affluent neighborhood. Where you run into problems is that lower socioeconomic neighborhoods are associated strongly with black/Latino populations and so it is indirectly biasing for select racial groups. I don’t think there’s a perfect solution, or one that is 100% equitable to all parties but I think we can do better than we are now, in fact I think it is crucial.

fromthestart 7y ago

If we allow entry of students from underperforming schools into colleges with historically high academic requirements, one of two things will happen, neither of which are particularly good: 1. These students will struggle and be much more likely to fail out, depending on how much of a boost they're given by the so called adversity score 2. Standards will be lowered and as a result graduates will be less competent and schools lose prestige and/or society suffers in the long run from workers who previously would not have qualified for their degrees. You cannot undo the damage of 12 years of poor schooling by simply throwing a student into a more rigorous curriculum, no matter how admirable the intent. And arguably point 2 has already been happening for some time anyway given the swelling of college ranks over the last few years and the corresponding devaluation of the college degree. More people may hold degrees, but the normal distribution of intelligence has not changed, which must indicate that the rigor of the average degree has dropped substantially in the last few decades given the proportion of the population that is now educated.

leetcrew 7y ago
those aren't the only two possible outcomes. I went to a pretty good state school with pretty generous admissions criteria, but very rigorous coursework. most of the required courses for stem majors started at the 200 level. if you got a "good" highschool education (ie passed calculus) you were expected to start with CS-201. if not, there were lots of gentle 100-level courses to ease you into programming or teach high school math material that you either didn't take or failed. note when I say gentle, I mean the material itself is not difficult. you would be assigned a large quantity of work in every class at every level. plenty of kids failed out along the way, but it was more because they didn't put in enough time than being hopelessly underprepared for the rigor. you do kinda have to give up on the "undergrad takes exactly four years" thing if you want this to work though. some people will need to do more than 120 credits to fulfill the requirements of the degree. not everyone will be able to take a full-time course load every semester or even any semester. that doesn't make the end result worse when they finally graduate (though it may be more expensive).
akhilcacharya 7y ago
1) Unlikely, because even today the most selective schools that use holistic admission have far higher graduation rates than less selective schools 2) Even if this is true, this is a feature not a bug As it turns out, college really isn’t all that difficult in most cases, and never has been. If anything standards have increased!

RickJWagner 7y ago

I would think that by college age, the raw input to the school had better be pretty well-refined and at roughly the same level. To let people into big-league colleges with any 'fudge factor' isn't doing them any favors. It's just an easy path to failure. (Also: even if the schools provide hand-holding and personal tutoring, the school had better make sure what is provided sticks. Very well. Else they may graduate some 'charity cases', but it won't be doing the graduates any favors when they hit the workforce.)

ThrustVectoring 7y ago
A large portion of the value of a degree is simply in signaling - it tells potential employers rough information about candidate IQ, conscientiousness, and social capital. Graduating unqualified students is absolutely a favor, and a huge one to boot. The primary people harmed are the other students, who suffer the ill effects of inflation in the value of their degree.

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akhilcacharya 7y ago

We can’t simultaneously be mad at programs like this and also say school doesn’t matter. Personally I think providing separate scores for adversity is a good thing. Ultimately getting into ones state school isn’t that difficult, and even if it was your SAT is a small part of that.

conscion 7y ago

Where are all the comments about racial diversity coming from? There's a single article mentioning that _using_ race is a contentious issue - not that this score uses race. Further down in the article, it lists what the scores are based on: > Those factors are college attendance, household structure, median family income, housing stability, education levels and crime. Which all sound like tests of the living conditions and environment that the students had to learn within - and if those strongly correlate with race, then maybe there's other issues that need to be addressed